Woman Waking Early in Late Fall

To meet the sun still wading through a dream

keeps her teetering between two worlds,

wearing the dream a while like a wig of flame.

Starlings, startled from their roost, retain

the bell-shape of the tree in flits and whorls,

then scatter on a field ice-paned from rain.

The dream dissolves. There is no thing itself.

The day increases even if starling-wheezes

remind her of the labored breathing he,

the one she dreamed, could not bear in the end—

her father’s famished body on the bed,

a gnarled and desiccated specimen.

The wind shifts northward and fresh gusts efface

the tree, a sweetgum, leaving nothing left

but scab-black spikes the starlings won’t refuse.

What can the sweetgum do now but accept

the murmuration tearing at its limbs

that tremble as the starlings scare and lift,

riding the same updrafts a sharp-shinned climbs?

What can she do but trace the starlings’ flight

from hawk-shadow, each dive and plaintive sweep

through fog wisps thin as nebulizer mist—

these birds her father taught her how to name

before she learned to read. The starlings zeep.

Clutching one of their hundreds in its grip,

the hawk becomes all sharp-shinned hawks at once,

a myth of itself, stropping the cluttered sky.

Bringer of flurry-blurs and songbird slaughter,

the hawk scales altitudes on hidden rope

hung from the ozone’s stratospheric rafter

in flight both circuit and circumference.

It blusters off to scarf its steaming meal,

a farther figure getting smaller faster,

appearing as a discrepancy of air,

a floater on a lens. Cloud-shadows blend.

Is this the season of before or after?